Facebook Introduces Hyper-Local Ads for Offline Stores

Facebook has launched a new feature called Hyper-Local Advertising to make advertising for local businesses easier and more effective — local awareness ads. Advertisers can set a radius as small as a mile around their business and ads will show up on peoples’s phone or web browser. The service will be live for US business owners in a few weeks, and around the globe in the next few months.

To create ads, Businesses need to choose address of their business, set their radius, gender, and age range, add a photo and message and can also add a call-to-action button for your ad — “Get Directions” (to help people find their store) or “Like Page”.

Based on Advertisers’s budget, they can determines how many peoples will see their add and can estimate the daily reach of the peoples at their store.

Apart from this, social networking company had also launched Facebook Messenger used by hundreds of millions of people, and it plans additional features such as mobile payments. Last month, it introduced web ad network and yesterday closed WhatsApp acquisition with an additional USD 3 billion to the initially stated USD 19 billion, and now has a price tag of USD 22 billion due to increased value of Facebook’s Stock in recent months.

This would be a game-changer in India surely. I hope google adwords campaigns do have as localised a campaign possible. It would attract a lot of organizations to come on the online marketing platform.

The internet penetration in India is just about 12% now. Once that increases the sky would be the limit.

Facebook, once again, shows the way, albeit for a different domain …

Author:

Sujata Sangwan

Sujata is an engineering graduate and has done her Post Graduation in Human Resource Management....